[iDC] Conferencing Formats

Sun Mar 5 12:15:34 EST 2006

Hi All,
I was following some of the discussions here about conferencing  
formats and wanted to alert you to a first iteration online symposium  
we're organizing called Breaking the Game http://www.workspace- 
unlimited.org/breakingthegame/symposium00.htm. I was working out some  
of the symposium's concepts and formats while I was  reading through  
iDC's ongoing discussions on "Conferencing Formats," and found the  
debates inspiring. In the ensuing weeks we'll be trying out a variety  
of experiments. We will post our experiences back to the iDC list. If  
you have additional thoughts about any of this, please don't hesitate  
to email. We will be doing new iterations of this project in months  
to come. So your input could be useful. Thanks.

------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
---------------------------------------------
 From March 15-26 2006 digital artist Thomas Soetens (Workspace  
Unlimited), architect Kora Van den Bulcke, and New York curator/ 
producer Wayne Ashley present Breaking the Game Symposium, a first- 
iteration online event that brings together competing theorists and  
practitioners to debate and reflect on virtual worlds, computer  
gaming, immersive technologies, and new possibilities for artistic  
practice and experience. The symposium will open up the art of game  
modification to the contingencies of everyday life, where interactive  
technologies increasingly mediate physical spaces and human movements  
in very complex and dynamic ways. The symposium themes are:  
Hybridity, Overclocking the City and The Virtual as Interface to Self  
and Society.

Participants will consider gaming and other virtual technologies in  
relationship to building and designing cities, navigating and  
experiencing urban life, constructing identities, and creating and  
maintaining social interaction. The symposium encourages debate and  
discussion through multiple formats including text, video interviews,  
phone blogging, images, animation, and virtual walkthroughs.

During this period we will explore all of the different ways for  
carrying on discussion remotely  Sometimes we will communicate  
synchronously and bring participants together through iChat (video  
conferencing for the Mac), through Skype (telephone conferencing), or  
text messaging--sometimes in interview format, other times in group  
discussion. We will schedule this with you beforehand and send you  
technical information.  We encourage participants to lead and  
organize debate on their own. Participants can always discuss and  
share asynchronously through text, like your typical online forum. We  
also want people to respond to one another with other media that they  
can upload themselves to our website. We understand that at certain  
times there will be more concentrated focus on specific issues. We  
don't expect people to be available all the time.

In the registration form http://www.workspace-unlimited.org/ 
breakingthegame/subscribe.htm we ask that  you put forth a proposal  
(max 1 page) for discussion or specific idea for participation, a  
framework, a perspective, a proposition, or a descriptive statement  
that articulates your relationship to one of the themes. There is a  
place in the registration form to fill that out called "proposal."  
This will help us understand your interests in relationship to the  
themes, and how you might relate to the other participants. What are  
the issues or questions that drive your work and how do they resonate  
with either of the themes? This statement will also guide our  
interview with you. (We will selectively interview participants about  
their perspective and upload the interview to the website. You may  
not want to be interviewed and that will be fine.)  We may also ask  
you to submit a media object  that best "embodies" your perspective  
(video, animation, text, a paper, software, etc.). We will upload  
these interviews and media objects  to Breaking the Game web site. We  
will let you know when the website has been launched.

We will use these interviews and media objects to get dialogue and  
debate going. Each time a new object or text is submitted  
participants will be alerted through email. Or you can go to the  
website anytime.

Breaking the Game is similar to an online forum with the addition of  
multiple media objects and periodic opportunities for real time  
communication.  We encourage you to think up new ways for interacting  
remotely. One participant, for example, wants to lead a "field trip"  
into a networked virtual world to explore some of his online  
projects. The participants in the symposium will meet there and  
discuss some of the issues by manipulating avatars and typing text,  
etc. This "field trip" will be recorded and uploaded as another media  
object. We want this symposium to be tied to real projects that feed  
into new practices.

Finally all of these media objects will be ported to a 3D navigable  
space using the Quake III gaming engine and be available though the  
Virtual World of Art network. Here it will continue to take on  
another kind of life and experience. Others will be able to navigate  
and encounter the symposium's themes and continue to add text, media,  
etc.

BREAKING THE GAME THEMES

“Hybridity” considers new forms of art being produced within the  
increasingly hybrid environment of digital and physical space, in  
response to the multiplication of delivery systems and formats, and  
to the changing roles of artists, scientists, and technologists. We  
will discuss whether or not, and under what conditions these hybrid  
contexts are effecting how we produce, with whom we collaborate, and  
with what results. How are we consuming art differently and  
integrating it into our lives in new ways? Finally we will explore a  
variety of hybrid experiments artists are undertaking within the now  
established field of video gaming and multiuser virtual environments.

“Overclocking the City” proposes that we look at gaming technologies  
and culture as storehouses of tools for designing new perceptual  
experiences and social interaction within the built environment. We  
will debate what it means to have a public space in an electronically  
networked virtual world, and what forms this space might take. We’ll  
consider how virtual worlds, which for the most part, have been  
designed as autonomous environments, might have a functioning  
relationship with actual places, buildings, and people in physical  
locations.

“The Virtual as Interface to Self and Society” explores  the  
continuing and expanding importance technologies of sensing,  
computation, and display have in how we connect to society and  
simultaneously engage in acts of self-reflection and self-fashioning.  
Virtual worlds, and particularly networked pervasive 3D environments,  
are great contexts for imaginatively exploring how we project our so- 
called self into computerized space, reconstruct it in digital form,  
and set about interacting with other reconstructed selves. In  
combination with "computer software programs, rules, commands, and  
networked interactivity" we perform a sense of presence to others by  
manipulating "graphical, textual, navigational, and audio modes that  
are coded to correspond with our bodily senses" (Bolter). How is this  
self-presence achieved, to what ends, and with what effects?

Organized by Workspace Unlimited: http://www.workspace-unlimited.org

______________________
Wayne Ashley
Workspace Unlimited

Tel. +1 917-803-4420
Skype: wayneashley
Aim: zevluvxx

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